rcsclean man page

rcsclean removes files that are not being worked on. rcsclean -u also unlocks and removes files that are being worked on but have not changed.

For each file given, rcsclean compares the working file and a revision in the corresponding RCS file. If it finds a difference, it does nothing. Otherwise, it first unlocks the revision if the -u option is given, and then removes the working file unless the working file is writable and the revision is locked. It logs its actions by outputting the corresponding rcs -u and rm -f commands on the standard output.

Files are paired as explained in ci(1). If no file is given, all working files in the current directory are cleaned. Filenames matching an RCS suffix denote RCS files; all others denote working files.

The number of the revision to which the working file is compared may be attached to any of the options -n, -q, -r, or -u. If no revision number is specified, then if the -u option is given and the caller has one revision locked, rcsclean uses that revision; otherwise rcsclean uses the latest revision on the default branch, normally the root.

rcsclean is useful for clean targets in makefiles. See also rcsdiff(1), which prints out the differences, and ci(1), which normally reverts to the previous revision if a file was not changed.

Preserve the modification time on the RCS file even if the RCS file changes because a lock is removed. This option can suppress extensive recompilation caused by a make(1) dependency of some other copy of the working file on the RCS file. Use this option with care; it can suppress recompilation even when it is needed, i.e. when the lock removal would mean a change to keyword strings in the other working file.

Options prepended to the argument list, separated by spaces. A backslash escapes spaces within an option. The RCSINIT options are prepended to the argument lists of most RCS commands. Useful RCSINIT options include -q, -V, -x, and -z.

Normally, for speed, commands either memory map or copy into memory the RCS file if its size is less than the memory-limit, currently defaulting to “unlimited”. Otherwise (or if the initially-tried speedy ways fail), the commands fall back to using standard i/o routines. You can adjust the memory limit by setting RCS_MEM_LIMIT to a numeric value lim (measured in kilobytes). An empty value is silently ignored. As a side effect, specifying RCS_MEM_LIMIT inhibits fall-back to slower routines.

Name of the temporary directory. If not set, the environment variables TMP and TEMP are inspected instead and the first value found is taken; if none of them are set, a host-dependent default is used, typically /tmp.